November 10, 2007

The idea was that NYC should be the 51st state. It'd be the 12th largest, you know. (In case you've been wondering how big a job it is to be mayor of NY.)

Sorry I don't have anything more to say about Norman Mailer. I've never read his books. I read the mean things Kate Millet wrote about him in "Sexual Politics," back around when that picture was taken of me. The man stabbed his wife and nearly killed her. Maybe I should have wanted to read what he had to say anyway — I've heard him interviewed on the radio and found him interesting — but I never did.

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash....

An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual—just like Norman Mailer, you see—starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.”

(Buggery—another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (“Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe—who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions—makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wants us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

[Novelist William] Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

It bothers me that Kimball does not acknowledge Kate Millet's attack. She set a generation of feminists — including me — against him. His name was poison for me for years, and I read "Executioner's Song" because I was writing about the death penalty theme, but the whole time I held Norman Mailer at a distance. (Writing this post, I initially forgot I'd read one of his books!) I was suspicious. I saw his respect for Gary Gilmore's sexual vigor, and I could still hear Kate Millet's denouncement echoing in my ears.

Of course, the feminists detest the social conservatives like Kimball, and vice versa, but would it kill Kimball to acknowledge the feminist attack, which was there in full view in 1969? Don't act like no one was onto him at the time.

Speaking of feminism, Kimball hates this quote from Mailer (from "Pieces and Pontifications"):

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

But Kimball should know that feminists — no matter how pro-abortion — hate that too.

As Mark Twain once said, "I did not attend the funeral but I thoroughly approved."Mailer's first, The Naked and the Dead, was superb and he was never able to come close to that level again. Kind of sad actually.

typical smart-ass comments by many who have read little or none of Mailer and just need to spill nonsense and venom. This better sums up Mailer's gifts, strengths and shortcomings:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?ex=1352350800&en=3c061e07a85792a1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Wow, your were hot once. For how long? It has to be longer then just that one day the picture was taken.Is the reason you never got married because guys saw that poster in your room and thought you were a lesiban?

Thanks. That article came when I was at the height of thinking that law review writing could be transformed. What I really needed was a blog. Oh, to have had a blog in 1991! I'm tormented by the loss. I put so much effort into passages in articles that could scarcely be noticed and if noticed hardly appreciated.

T Mack said..."Wow, your were hot once. For how long? It has to be longer then just that one day the picture was taken. Is the reason you never got married because guys saw that poster in your room and thought you were a lesiban?"

Why do you think I never got married, and why do you think that's my room or my poster? And what the hell is a lesiban? TMack, you need to screw your head back on straight. I think we all suspect that TMack is one of those guys who see women who won't have them and conclude they must be lesbians (or lesibans).

What you say is undoubtedly true. But why, then, does the phrase casting pearls to swine come to mind? Or do the swine not matter when all is said and done? Anybody who can make the point about Rehnquist's dangling participle shouldn't write for free, I say.

I believe approximately 10,000 people came to the funeral of Jack Cohen who was a movie mogul and a famous rat bastard. When they asked Errol Flynn why did so many people show up, he replied "Well when you give the people what they want....." I bet Mr. Mailer’s services will be very well attended

I cannot believe the woman posted a pic of herself right after the headline about Mailer. The pic has nothing to do with Mailer whatsoever, but why let an opportunity for attention pass you by.

What's your beef with women in sweaters again? Um, I'm seeing a coy Ann here looking up, with her legs spread. I have no problem with that, but hell, it's certainly more sexually suggestive than a pic of a woman standing normally who happens to be wearing a sweater.

1. Mailer died2. He once ran for mayor of nyc3. Ann has a picture commemmorating the event.4. Unlike a picture of a certain person with a certain famous horndog, in the picture, Ann(a) does not accentuate any part of her anatomy, and(b) does not accentuate any part of her anatomy to the benefit of any other person.

I was twelve or thirteen when I read The Naked and the Dead. I thought it was a great novel. Then, at age eighteen I went over a bow ramp at Chu Lai, May the 7th, 1965. After fghting a war I had the chance to read that book again and discovered how utterly lame and inane it was.

As for the picture of our hostess, perhaps it is because I am an adult but I kind of like the Ann of today, speaking of reletive hotness.

The picture does have a look of sullen 60’s radical chic but I’m guessing there’s less to it than that.

I hate to be more literal than others here, but it appears that you are turning the page of a book rather than rolling anything. I’m just guessing, but the sullen pout seems more due to the fact you’ve just been rudely blinded by a flash bulb, rather than anything overtly sexual in nature as some here have imagined.

If indeed the poster is yours at all. The fact that you hadn’t read anything by Norman Mailer but appear beneath a prominently displayed the Mailer-Breslin for Mayor poster might be called ironic, but it’s would be hardly ironic for a youth to make an iconic association with something they’ve made no attempt to understand. Or maybe the poster is just there.

Well, it wasn't my poster (or my room), and I don't know what I'm doing with my hands, but I'm certainly not rolling a cigarette, as that's something I've never done in my life. I do think I seem to have a bad attitude. Not Manson-family bad though. Just art-student bad.

Funny how images from certain periods conjure up all sorts of things in peoples imaginations (usually wrong things). We have an old picture of my brother-in-law in a leisure suit circa 1972. Never fails to get all sorts of comments. Truth is he proposed in it. That always gets a good laugh. Kinda scary that way too. My sister drags the picture out every once in a while and tells her husband that the answer is no. Teasing of course.

Maybe you forgot reading The Executioner's Song because it was the only Mailer book from which Mailer himself was conspicuously absent, and, not coincidentally, possibly the only really good book he ever wrote. You detect his sexual attitudes in it even so, and you may be right. What I remember about it is that so many people looked at Gary Gilmore from so many different perspectives, including Gilmore himself, and then the firing squad shot him and the pathologists took his body apart, and the mystery of Gilmore -- and by extension, of anyone -- escaped.

"I was twelve or thirteen when I read The Naked and the Dead. I thought it was a great novel. Then, at age eighteen I went over a bow ramp at Chu Lai, May the 7th, 1965. After fghting a war I had the chance to read that book again and discovered how utterly lame and inane it was."

I only had to serve in the peacetime military, and grow up a bit, to realize how lame it was. Two-thirds of the book is crap, namely the absurd time-machine portraits and the discussions on politics/Fascism between the general and the 2nd Lt.

Mailer could never write convincingly about people who were not Norman Mailer. But I thought the descriptions of the marching and the jungle were well done.